Information imbalance.

Originally posted by RJHinds
Yes I do argue that the world is 6000 years old and that humans co-existed with dinosaurs.
😏

That's what I mean. You're not right either. Doesn't stop you from arguing it, though.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Can you actually back this statement up and actually demonstrate that there are questions [on this forum or otherwise] that have any cogent meaning that cannot be addressed via the scientific method.

I see what you did there. 🙂

Originally posted by Suzianne
That's what I mean. You're not right either. Doesn't stop you from arguing it, though.

Yeah, I am. 😏

Originally posted by Suzianne
I see what you did there. 🙂

Well if you ask "do querbleflups matterstringle their fibblewiblets?"

That question is unanswerable by science, because it's meaningless gibberish.

Given that it's possible to ask such questions I can't say that there are no questions
science cannot answer.

Hence the qualification.

Originally posted by DeepThought
When you say "Questions that actually have answers" do you mean questions where the answer is known - where justified and true are taken to be within normal levels of certainty. Or do you mean questions which are answerable, an answer is believed to exist, but no such answer is known.

If there is no empirical evidence for some question then it's diff ...[text shortened]... understand Gödel's theorem well enough to tell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski's_axioms

I was responding to this:

If I want answers to the kinds of metaphysical questions posed in this forum then science really isn't any use as there's no empirical evidence and no sound justification for extrapolating from nomological certainties.

And was basing my response on the [I fully admit unstated] assumption that we were dealing with the
subset of all possible questions that deal with the nature of reality and our place in it ect..

The kind of questions asked on these forums, and in similar contexts.


Of course questions of pure logic and mathematics ect are not 'scientific' questions that are not answered by
science.

However those are not the questions generally asked on these forums.

Originally posted by googlefudge
I was responding to this:

If I want answers to the kinds of [b]metaphysical questions posed in this forum then science really isn't any use as there's no empirical evidence and no sound justification for extrapolating from nomological certainties.

And was basing my response on the [I fully admit unstated] assumption that we were de ...[text shortened]... t answered by
science.

However those are not the questions generally asked on these forums.[/b]

Sure, but you also stated something that has a known answer so:

"Is there a God."

Is the obvious metaphysical question for this forum. Problem is that, sonship claims to know there is and you claim to know there's not. So there isn't a generally accepted answer to that one.

Questions about ethics is something I could go for, but it's fairly easy to make an argument that they can be scientifically analysed, using methods from, for example, evolutionary psychology (which has always struck me as complete bunk, but never-the-less technically science).

"Are there parallel universes?", personally I don't see why not. One of the leading lights in philosophy, David Lewis, regards the possible worlds of Kripke semantics in modal logic as being real. Is he right? Well we can argue about it until we're blue in the face but there is no hope of ever knowing.

So I'm a little stuffed for a question that actually has a known answer. Is the ontological argument sound? (No) The problem is that once again we're into logic territory.

"Do I exist?" from the point of view of the extreme skepticism Decartes was trying to apply is quite a good one. Science is going to say yes, clearly, but it can't cope with that level of skepticism. However we each know that we exist.

That's the best I can think of off hand. Your question poses too many constraints. Questions of metaphysics, which can't be answered by empirical science, logic or maths, and have a known answer. It has to be a priori knowledge, as anything a posteriori is by its nature empirical, in order to be know.

Originally posted by DeepThought
I looked up Daniel 12:4:

But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.

I think claiming that this is a prediction of the internet is not really sustainable. You might be able to claim it predicted the modern phenomenon of running marathons though.

Yes, it's a major problem with fundamentalists: they often use the Bible as non-Christians use the predictions of Nostradamus, or the works of Shakespeare. That this is obviously not how the Bible (or even Shakespeare) was meant to be used doesn't seem to bother them.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Well if you ask "do querbleflups matterstringle their fibblewiblets?"

That question is unanswerable by science, because it's meaningless gibberish.

Given that it's possible to ask such questions I can't say that there are no questions
science cannot answer.

Hence the qualification.

But my point is that that also opens the door for subjective opinion.

Originally posted by DeepThought
So I'm a little stuffed for a question that actually has a known answer.

Are you actually capable of dealing with the posts as I actually write them?

Or must you always insert your own assumptions into my posts?


Do me a favour and go back and see which of us inserted "actually has a known answer"
into the conversation.

I'll give you a hint, it was you.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Are you actually capable of dealing with the posts as I actually write them?

Or must you always insert your own assumptions into my posts?


Do me a favour and go back and see which of us inserted "actually has a known answer"
into the conversation.

I'll give you a hint, it was you.

People keep saying things like this, but when pressed cannot actually provide
questions that actually have answers that cannot be tackled via the scientific
method.

Was what you wrote. The word actually is what I translated into known. If a question has an actual answer then it has a known answer. The one entails the other.

Originally posted by DeepThought

People keep saying things like this, but when pressed cannot actually provide
questions that actually have answers that cannot be tackled via the scientific
method.

Was what you wrote. The word actually is what I translated into known. If a question has an actual answer then it has a known answer. The one entails the other.

Not in any version of English I know.

You are just making up post-hoc rationalisations for your mistake.

A question can have an 'actual answer' without anyone knowing what it is.

If you don't know what I mean you can [and should] ask me to clarify what I mean.

What you actually do however is assume you know what I mean, get it wrong,
and waste a bunch of time shooting down a strawman.

And the fact that I keep pointing this out to you should be causing you to alter
your behaviour so you don't keep making the same mistake.

Originally posted by googlefudge
Not in any version of English I know.

You are just making up post-hoc rationalisations for your mistake.

A question can have an 'actual answer' without anyone knowing what it is.

If you don't know what I mean you can [and should] ask me to clarify what I mean.

What you actually do however is assume you know what I mean, get it wrong,
and wa ...[text shortened]... o you should be causing you to alter
your behaviour so you don't keep making the same mistake.

A quick check on the Oxford online dictionary gives "actual" meaning: "Existing in fact" or "real", or "existing now" or "current". It also has a subsidiary meaning emphasising importance. "Actually" has a similar meaning indicating that in the context of an actual answer it must mean a real one. Things that are real exist in fact. If an answer exists in fact then that entails that it must be known.

I took a look at a rationalist website twhitehead posted a while ago. They seemed to make great play of informal fallacies, which as a way of defending oneself against believing the bad arguments of others is fine. This is something that should be taught in schools. I don't think that it automatically invalidates a position that someone has generated a fallacy when attempting to defend it. I also don't think the website authors intend one to start throwing accusations of fallacy around in debates. In the past week you've accused me of fallacious argument a few times and in each case I think you have been wrong.

Further on one of my posts on the previous page, right at the top of it, I wrote this:

When you say "Questions that actually have answers" do you mean questions where the answer is known - where justified and true are taken to be within normal levels of certainty. Or do you mean questions which are answerable, an answer is believed to exist, but no such answer is known.

Since all questions have an answer [1], assuming you meant a known one was quite a natural thing to do. The word "actually" obfuscated your meaning. I asked for clarification and you failed to clarify. So, no it wasn't a strawman, but you claiming it was, actually [2].

The most obvious questions which science will get nowhere with is:

Is there a God?

Science is stuffed on that one because there is no way of doing an experiment. This isn't a great problem for science, it just proceeds by assuming that it does not make any difference to the questions scientists are trying to answer.

Another good one is:

Was Parmindes right when he said that everything is an illusion?

If empirical evidence does not tell us the truth about reality then all that the scientific approach can tell us about is the illusion, it cannot tell us about the underlying reality as one of it's foundational assumptions is that empirical evidence reveals the truth. It simply cannot produce a reliable answer to that question.

[1] Something like an ill-posed problem has an answer, it's just that the answer is that the solution to the system of partial differential equations for the given boundary conditions doesn't exist.

[2] This one of two alternative uses of the word "actually", to indicate a contradictory opinion. The other use is to indicate surprise, but in the context that wouldn't make any sense.

Originally posted by DeepThought
A quick check on the Oxford online dictionary gives "actual" meaning: "Existing in fact" or "real", or "existing now" or "current". It also has a subsidiary meaning emphasising importance. "Actually" has a similar meaning indicating that in the context of an actual answer it must mean a real one. Things that are real exist in fact. If an answer exist ...[text shortened]... pinion. The other use is to indicate surprise, but in the context that wouldn't make any sense.

Man are you dense.

A quick check on the Oxford online dictionary gives "actual" meaning: "Existing in fact" or "real", or "existing now" or "current". It also has a subsidiary meaning emphasising importance. "Actually" has a similar meaning indicating that in the context of an actual answer it must mean a real one. Things that are real exist in fact. If an answer exists in fact then that entails that it must be known.

There is an answer to the question "does intelligent extraterrestrial life exist in this galaxy?"

However the answer to that question is not known.

Your position is disproved.

Further on one of my posts on the previous page, right at the top of it, I wrote this:When you say "Questions that actually have answers" do you mean questions where the answer is known - where justified and true are taken to be within normal levels of certainty. Or do you mean questions which are answerable, an answer is believed to exist, but no such answer is known.Since all questions have an answer [1], assuming you meant a known one was quite a natural thing to do. The word "actually" obfuscated your meaning. I asked for clarification and you failed to clarify. So, no it wasn't a strawman, but you claiming it was, actually

I did spot that you had asked that question.

Being busy I hadn't gotten around to answering.

You then assumed that you were correct and ran with it without waiting for my response.

Which is what I accused you of doing, so I am still correct.

Is there a God?

Science is stuffed on that one because there is no way of doing an experiment. This isn't a great problem for science, it just proceeds by assuming that it does not make any difference to the questions scientists are trying to answer.

Wrong.

There are plenty of fields of science where you can't 'do an experiment' to verify something.
That doesn't mean that we cannot apply science to answering the question.

And this was absolutely one of the questions I had in mind when I made my original point.

This is an answerable question [just so long as you don't require absolute certainty].

Originally posted by googlefudge
Man are you dense.

[quote]A quick check on the Oxford online dictionary gives "actual" meaning: "Existing in fact" or "real", or "existing now" or "current". It also has a subsidiary meaning emphasising importance. "Actually" has a similar meaning indicating that in the context of an actual answer it must mean a real one. Things that are real exist ...[text shortened]... point.

This is an answerable question [just so long as you don't require absolute certainty].

But is there an actual answer to the question "Is there extra-terrestrial life in the galaxy?"?

So, your point seems to be missing some relevance. There is no actual answer to that question as far as human science is concerned.

It made sense to answer the question I thought you were answering in the post on the previous page (2) to save time. You had a perfectly good opportunity in the post just under your reply to Suzianne to correct the misunderstanding but did not. So there's no point in complaining. Since you had not done so I was perfectly entitled to proceed.

Re is there a God:

I'd like to see you justify your statement that science can probe the existence of God, or anything else, without doing an experiment.

It's difficult to think of a field where science makes predictions where no measurements can be made. Even in astronomy measurements are made, they can look at waves on the surface of the sun to deduce things about the internal structure. The theories they are basing it on are experimentally verified.

With God the situation is somewhat different. There isn't a theory that is any use in trying to answer the question and so experiment is possible.

Color me late to this party, but—

And to get some personal stuff out of the way before being questioned: I at present consider myself to be an agnostic non-supernaturalist non-dualist theist. I know that this puts me outside the conventional mainstream today, but it does not put me outside of a longstanding history of understandings of theos that always have been outside modern, western convention (including in the history of Christian doctrine).

With that said, my thinking generally follows these lines:

One cannot declare belief, disbelief—or even withhold belief—with respect to a concept of god that is logically incoherent or that has no sense. This also applies to attributes assigned to god. In other words, even if the essential definition is coherent, if the particular attributes—such as justness—subsequently added are incoherent or without sense, then there is literally nothing for one to say about them. As googlefudge has pointed out here—and I have in the past elsewhere—the fact that a series of terms can be put together in the form of a grammatical sentence is irrelevant. And this is true with respect to (individually) sensible terms as well as nonsensical ones.

A god-concept need only be in-principle empirically testable (falsifiable)—without regard to whether any such tests are currently available—to be considered within the purview of scientific inquiry.* I don’t see how supernaturalism is testable in any way—all that could be tested are natural occurrences, which means they are subject to natural laws, but there seems to me to be little epistemic warrant for admitting the supernatural category in such cases (e.g., “god of the gaps stuff” ). But that is because I think that the supernatural category simply “lacks sense”—so that there is nothing sensible that anyone can say about it.

So the question, with regard to a logically coherent god-concept may not be whether or not such a concept can be shown to be true or false (to some sufficient probability anyway), but whether belief (perhaps of the agnostic kind) can be warranted? A testable god-concept that is falsified (to some sufficient probability) certainly offers no such warrant.

The area of interest, for me, then would be a “naturalized” god-concept—such as some, perhaps updated, version of the theos of the ancient Stoics (and, I suspect, some early Christians such as Justin Martyr). I see no logical (“in-principle” ) bar on testing for the hypothesis, but that does not mean that there is—or will be in the future—such tests. I suspect that such a god-concept is just unnecessary as an explanatory variable for scientific inquiry—again, excluding “god of the gaps” types of arguments. At the same time, that’s as far as I think Okham’s Razor is applicable.

To repeat: consider me an agnostic theist with regard to such a (naturalistic and non-dualistic) god-concept—which I am still exploring.

* Googlefudge might correct me if I've gone off the rails here, though I do not restrict the word "testable" to mean just "subject to experiment"--as opposed to, say statistical analysis of observations.

________________________________________________________

I want to say a word about the word “belief”. In the above, I have used it in the conventional, epistemological sense of thinking that some proposition is true, factual. I do not think this is the relevant understanding—for Christian religion—of either the original Greek word pisteo or the English word believe when it was used to translate pisteo. pisteo means to be confident, or “to faith” (not, literally to “have” faith), to trust. The English word believe is cognate with such words as “love” and “life”, and meant “to hold dear”. [see John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins.)

Although such concepts as “confidence” and “trust” do figure in epistemological considerations, that is not their sole usage. And there remain today usages of both “faith” and “belief” that are essentially non-epistemological. A classic example is from sports psychology. When an athlete is asked to “believe” that s/he can make what appears to be an impossible shot, they are not being asked to reconsider the actual probability of success. Rather, they understand that even a remote chance of success is undermined if they act in a lackadaisical way, and enhanced if they act with as much confidence as they can muster.

This is the one usage for which I think that so-called “pragmatic belief” is justified. Recently, I have found this kind of belief to be helpful, even perhaps necessary, in my life. (And this is the usage that I generally intend when speaking of religious or philosophical “faith”—e.g., as a kind of existential attitude of confidence that enhances my daily living.) Again, this is the only—non-epistemological—usage of the word “belief” that I think can be justified in such a pragmatic way.

However, this usage is really irrelevant to this thread—I just wanted to articulate it: it at least illustrates that people need to know how they are using the term in discussion, just as it’s necessary to know what kind of god-concept one is talking about.